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Map of Resistance

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2017

INVISIBLE to the frenzied world of urban dwellers, and anchored in the rural hinterlands of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, live communities of peasants — small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers — joined together in their tumultuous fight against forces bent upon usurping their rights to land, to produce and to continue their way of life. La Via Campesina (literally ‘the peasant way’) is a unique international labour movement representing 200 million rural workers in 73 countries.

Today, April 17, is the International Day of Peasants Struggles celebrated by La Via Campesina the world over to honour the 19 members of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement who were shot dead by the military police on this day in 1996 in the village of Eldorado Los Carajás during a demonstration against federal appropriation of land cultivated by 3,000 rural families.

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Right to the City

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2017

“Contemplating those essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustained the cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons and then how they sadden and fall to ruin.” — Italo Calvino

KARACHI is a city of incongruities and contradictions. Every morning as you leave your habitat, be it a palatial place, modest abode or a makeshift hut, and negotiate the space to reach your workplace you confront a city that lies in ruin: pot-holed roads, pools of sewage, garbage heaps, snarling traffic. But amidst chaos, disorder, missing rule of law and inequity, there is palpable energy, dynamism, a certain hope, a cosmopolitanism, that constantly draw people to this city to find work and a living. Karachi is ranked near the bottom — 134th among 140 cities in the Global Liveability Ranking 2016. The cities of the world are assessed on this index according to five key criteria: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.

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Work Ethics

Published in Dawn on February 5 2017

THE discourse on labour in Pakistan is dominated by the terms and conditions of employment and other indicators such as the labour participation rate and the status of employment. Labour productivity, a crucial measure of economic performance and one of the key indicators of the labour market, receives scant attention and is yet to be reported by the Federal Bureau of Statistics in its yearly Labour Force Survey being published since 1963.

The factors that determine labour productivity include physical capital and technology, human development (health, education and skills of the labour force) and labour relations. Underpinning productivity is work ethics which is considered the key force behind economic growth and prosperity in any country. Though work ethics, or the lack of it, in our society is constantly commented on in the private sphere, the issue is seldom debated or researched by social scientists, economists and policymakers.

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Migrant Smuggling

Published in Dawn on January 15th, 2017

“There are many horizons that must be visited … and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed…” Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North.

IT was 1991 and I was travelling by road in a small group to Iran, Turkey and Greece. In Maku, a city in a mountain gorge in west Azerbaijan province, 22 kilometres away from the Turkish border, we met two Bangladeshis who were travelling to Turkey onward to Greece “on mules”, they told us.

I was flabbergasted. “We travel by night, lest we are caught,” they shared with us, their fellow South Asians. Once they would reach Greece, they planned to slip away to greener pastures — Germany or France. Later, in a small pension in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosphorus, we were served by a young man from Punjab who told us his tale of woe: his agent, also a Pakistani, had robbed him of his passport and dollars.

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Core and Periphery

Published in Dawn on December 31st, 2016

“People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.” — Immanuel Wallerstein

IN his world system analysis, Wallerstein speaks of a multiplicity of political systems which gives capitalists a “freedom of manoeuvre that is structurally based”.

This analysis explains how the system works when the core (rich) countries export waste to peripheral (poor) economies in the shape of decaying ships. It is the core (industrialist-state) nexus in the peripheral country itself which benefits at the expense of its peripheral (marginalised) labour. A follow-up of the disaster at the Gadani ship-breaking yard in Balochistan validates the premise.

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Corruption and Lady Health Workers

HOW do you deal with deceit, dishonesty and debasement in your day-to-day life? Sounds like an existential question. Substitute the three D’s with a single word, ‘corruption’, and the question loses its dimensions and sounds almost clichéd.

Inducted into the Urdu lexicon and used ad nauseam in our popular political discourse, the word when deconstructed in a specific context holds a mirror up to ordinary lives made difficult through avarice and misuse of entrusted power. A look at ‘corruption’ through the perspective of Lady Health Workers (LHWs) explains why corruption is termed by the UN on the International Anti-Corruption Day (observed two weeks ago) as one of the biggest obstacles to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and a formidable hurdle in the path of “development, peace and security”.

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Workers in FATA

Published in Dawn November 28th, 2016

FOR decades, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) presented an image of its people as fierce, loyal to tribal customs, and living under the harsh colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), 1901. Later, this image was replaced with that of the militants and religious extremists at war with the state and amongst themselves.

Far from the area, we somehow failed to imagine them as ordinary people like ourselves going about life, struggling to earn a livelihood and dreaming of a better tomorrow — but in a war-torn region whilst yearning to be free of the FCR.

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Ship of Sorrows

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2016

FOR millennia, the symbol of the ship epitomised hope and the promise of new horizons. With the discoveries of new lands and the onset of trade, the image of the ship was besmirched with the sufferings of human cargo — the slaves — transported in and out of continents. Then, more recently, emerged the phenomenon of boats full of refugees and immigrants capsizing on Western shores. What remains hidden, or not so visible, in our collective consciousness is the story of ships being broken down across South Asia’s shores, bringing in their wake death and despair to those who dismantle, bit by bit, the decaying, hazardous, mammoth machines.

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Combating Silicosis

Published in Dawn October 16th, 2016

IT may sound like a strange word for many of us urban dwellers, yet for those involved in the world of hazardous work it raises alarm — silicosis is an incurable lung disease that leads to respiratory failure and death.

Caused by inhaling silica dust while engaged in industrial operations such as mining, quarrying, sandblasting, rock-drilling, road construction and stone masonry, silicosis afflicts tens of millions of workers and kills thousands of people every year worldwide, according to ILO. The silver lining is that the disease is preventable and thus European countries, the US and Canada have reduced its incidence to a minimum. In South Asia, however, including Pakistan, silicosis mortality rate remains very high.

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Islamophobia in America

Published in Dawn September 28th, 2016

THE US elections have stoked excitement and fear among all, in and outside the country. The liberals hate Trump whom they think is dangerous and reckless and backed by uncouth rednecks; they say he would play havoc with civil rights if in power. A white Democrat American said (jokingly) to me that she would seek political asylum in Pakistan if Trump won.

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